Tyanna Buie’s “On Vacation” at CCS Center Galleries @ Hyperallergic

DETROIT — Traveling is important for many people, but perhaps especially for artists, as it offers a world of opportunity to be exposed to new information and ideas, as well as to view one’s own existence from a distance. Printmaker Tyanna Buie reinforces this idea by introducing her exhibition at the College for Creative Studies Center Galleries, On Vacation, with a quote from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: “Writers (Artists) are on holiday, but their Muse in awake, and gives birth non-stop.”

This certainly seems to be the case for Buie, who traveled last year to New Orleans, Paris, and Berlin and out of her experiences made a gripping group of works that bridge the foreign and the familiar. Most of the nine screen prints on display synthesize imagery and information from more than one of these destinations.

While in New Orleans, Buie took the opportunity to learn more about the Creole roots of her surname, a search that took her to Le Museé de f.p.c., a house museum honoring the history of free people of color in New Orleans. There she learned about the tignon laws that required (free) women of color to wear hair covers.